“Snap out of it,” he said roughly. “Kerry was a bum and you’re another.”
“Then you’re another.”
“You may be right at that. Now listen to me. I’m stashing you in a place I know in Venice, a garage apartment off the speedway. Are you set?”
“How do I know you’ll ever come back?”
“I’m not that much of a bum. Besides, I got a business I can’t leave. How do I know this red-head has the money?”
“Nobody else could have. Only she isn’t a red-head any more. She let her hair grow out, I told you. It’s gray.”
“Where do I look for her?”
“I’ll lay it out for you on the way. We better go round by Sepulveda. They’re probably watching the highway for me by now.”
“If we get stopped, I’m taking you into custody. Understand?”
“Yeah, I understand. They can’t do nothing to me. I wasn’t under arrest or anything. I’m clean.”
“Sure, you have that chlorophyll sweetness. I’ve always loved it in you.”
“Go button it where it flaps.”
The doorknob rotated, and the door opened inward. Bourke saw me. His hand slid up like a white lizard under his left lapel. I drove my left hand under it, into his body. He swung his left at me, but he was off balance. I brought my right around over his arm, and found his jaw. He looked away to his right in dazed surprise. My left hand met him there.
Bourke went to his knees in the doorway. His head bowed forward in a profound salaam, and bumped the floor. Sam came around from behind me and took the blue revolver out of his hand.
At the back of the cluttered studio, Molly was trying to open the door. The reflection of the sea shone through the curtained windows like a dim blue hope, lighting one side of her face. It was drawn, like carved white bone, and hungry-looking.
The bolt stuck fast in the socket. She never did get the door open.
I left her struggling and chattering in Sam’s old arms, and went back to Bourke. He was prone on the floor under the hollow counter. I pulled him up to a sitting position and found the photograph in the breast pocket of his natty checkered jacket. When I released him, he fell back under the counter. He lay gasping for air, his head rolling back and forth like a restless infant’s, in months’ accumulation of dirt.
It was a wallet-sized photograph, tinted amateurishly with oils. The colors were faded, as if long nights of looking had worn them thin. Still I could see the traces of red on the mouth and the high cheekbones, the brownish tinge in the eyes, the coarse henna lights in the hair. Amy Miner.
chapter 28
When we reached the Pacific Point courthouse, Amy had finished proclaiming her innocence to the Grand Jury, and had been released from custody. The D.A. came out of the jury session to talk to me. He felt, and the jurors agreed, that Fred Miner was definitely guilty, but Amy wasn’t. I didn’t argue. Instead I gave him Molly and the photograph.
According to the bailiff, Amy had walked out of the sheriff’s office a free woman shortly before two o’clock. Helen Johnson had called for her in the Lincoln. Presumably Helen had driven Amy home with her.
It was ten minutes after three.
I phoned from Sam Dressen’s office. Jamie answered, breathily: “Hi. Is that you, Mummy?”
“This is Howard Cross.”
“Hi, Howard. I thought you were my Mummy.”
“Where is your Mummy?”
“Oh, she went for a ride, I guess.”
“Where to?”
“San Francisco, I guess. My Grandma’s here.”
The telephone was taken away from him. A woman’s voice said sharply, over his protests:
“Who is speaking, please?”
“Howard Cross.”
“Oh, yes. Helen has mentioned you. I’m her mother.”
“Has she really gone to San Francisco?”
“Of course not. Jamie must have got it mixed up. She’s on her way to San Diego with Mrs. Miner. I expect her home early this evening, if you’d like to leave a message.”
“Where are they going in San Diego?”
“To Mrs. Miner’s family home. Helen insisted on driving her down. I thought myself that it was a case of leaning over backwards–”
“Do you know the address?”
“I’m afraid I don’t. They wouldn’t be there yet, in any case. They only left a very short time ago.” Her voice, which was pleasantly harsh, took on a roguish lilt. “I think Helen expected you to call, Mr. Cross. In case you did, she left a little message for you. She said there were no hard feelings. And may I say for myself, as Jamie’s grandmother, I’m looking forward–”
“Thank you.” I hung up on her.
Sam, who had his moments, was ready with a San Diego directory. “Do you know her maiden name, Howie?”
“Wolfe. Amy Wolfe.” I spelled it out.
There were a number of Wolfes in the directory. We left their names and numbers in the communications room and took a radio car. The dispatcher reached us by short wave before we passed La Jolla. The one we wanted was Daniel Wolfe, who ran a grocery store in the east end.
Danny’s Neighborhood Market was on a corner in a working-class residential district. The store had been built onto the front of an old two-story frame house, so long ago that it was now old itself. On the front window someone had written smearily in soap: Special – Fresh Ranch Eggs. There was no sign of Helen’s car. Except for a pair of young women wheeling baby carriages half a block away, and an old dog couchant in the road, the street was deserted. The dusty palms that lined it stirred languidly in the late-afternoon breeze.
I left Sam Dressen parked out of sight around the corner. A bell tinkled over the door when I went in. The store was small and badly lit, its air soured with the odor of spilled milk which had long since dried and been forgotten. Behind a meat counter at the rear, a man in a dirty-fronted white apron was waiting on a customer, a young woman wearing tight blue jeans and large earrings.
She asked him for a quarter of a pound of small bologna. He sliced it carefully, weighed it, and wrapped it. His hands were very large, and heavily furred with black hair. The hair on top of his head was thin and gray. His eyebrows were heavy and black. His face looked almost too thin and old to support the eyebrows.
There was a rack of comic books and confession magazines beside the front counter, and I made a pretense of looking them over. The counter was crowded with things for sale: bottle openers and recaps, packages of beef jerky, humorous postcards, rubber lizards, bubble gum, artificial flies imbedded in plastic ice-cubes, cloves of garlic. On the wall behind the counter hung a display card studded with icepicks. The icepicks had red plastic handles.
The man in the apron came forward to the cash register to make change. His customer departed with her bologna.
He leaned forward with one hand on the counter, thrusting one sharp shoulder higher than the other. “You want something?”
“One of those icepicks, behind you.”
He turned and plucked one out of the display card. “I better wrap it for you. You wouldn’t want to stick yourself.”
“I’ll take it as it is.”
He handed it to me. So far as I could tell, it was identical with the icepick I had found in Lemp’s neck.
“They haven’t been selling the way the salesman said they were going to sell.” His voice was bitter and monotonous, threaded by a disappointed whine. “You never can trust their say-so. I don’t think I sold four of them in six months. Anything else?”
“No, thanks.”
“That’ll be twenty-five cents and one cent tax. Twenty-six cents.”
I gave him two dimes and six pennies.